This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
About 30 employees were evacuated Sunday from the control tower of Salt Lake City International Airport when a small fire broke out in an elevator control box.
Sunday's incident marked the second time in a month that air traffic control personnel were left helpless with no communication with arriving planes.
The evacuation killed air traffic control capabilities at the airport for about 20 minutes as employees moved operations to the old control tower in terminal one, said airport operations director Roy Williams.
Minor delays were experienced when a ground stop - an order which prevents planes from taking off or landing - was ordered while the tower functions were relocated. At least two regional airline planes were diverted to airports in Idaho, Williams said.
Witnesses reported seeing smoke coming from the base of the 20-floor tower around 3 p.m. Salt Lake City firefighters determined that an accumulation of water from the fire safety sprinkler system dripped into the control box, causing a short and sparking flames, Williams said.
While firefighters checked the building, the four tower control personnel and about 15 radar control employees scurried to bring operations back on line from the terminal one tower, which was abandoned about 10 years ago, according to Williams.
For the 20 minutes that communication with airplanes en route to Salt Lake City was disrupted, pilots were directed to communicate with operations systems in the region or rely on a high-altitude radar system that was not disrupted by the evacuation, according to Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Mike Fergus.
Both Fergus and Williams said the safety of the planes in the air was not jeopardized by the temporary shutdown.
"It's one of the wonderful aspects of the redundancy of the system," Williams said.
Planes approaching the airport were slowed down to give greater distance between them. Access to how many flights were affected by the delay or how many planes were in the air when the ground stop was placed would not be available from the FAA until Tuesday, Fergus said. He did say, however, that 3 p.m. on a Sunday was not the airport's busiest time.
The tower was back in use by about 4:30 p.m. after fire investigators cleared it for operation, albeit with no elevator, said Williams.
On Aug. 3, tower communications were disrupted when a crew of technicians performing routine maintenance on a back-up generator allowed power necessary for flight operations to be cut. The disruption panicked air traffic controllers who used cell phones to alert nearby communication centers of the outage. No arrivals were delayed during the 20-minute break, but about 40 departing flights were delayed for a half-hour, according to FAA officials.